Donald Trump doesn’t run the Republican Party so much as terrorize it.
During the reality-show president’s time in office, the GOP resembles one of those families neighbors whisper about behind drawn curtains. You know, the kind where an unstable, sheetrock-punching patriarch rules the house and other family members regularly try to hide black eyes and suppress deep emotional scars.
By now, every Republican knows Trump is volatile, vindictive and catastrophically impulsive. But instead of filing for divorce, they keep going back for more abuse and trying to explain that their latest bruise was from a clumsy slip in the shower.
And now comes U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas: the latest cautionary tale in the Republican Party’s long-running hostage situation.
Nobody debased himself more enthusiastically for Trump than John Cornyn. Here was a longtime institutional Republican who spent months groveling for affection from a man who fundamentally despises institutions — and fundamentally despised him.
Yet Cornyn swallowed his dignity on the daily, posing for a photo op reading Trump’s Art of the Deal that played like a bad parody and even promising to name a highway after his Supreme Leader. Like every battered spouse in a bad relationship, Cornyn convinced himself that if he just behaved correctly, if he just stopped “provoking” the outbursts, maybe the kicks to the gut would stop.
Instead, Trump aimed even lower.
One week before the runoff, Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a man whose fat-to-bursting suitcase full of scandals makes him a joke of a general election choice. Why? Because the president doesn’t evaluate candidates on electability, competence, morality or even strategic value. Instead, he acts on impulse and aligns himself with those who have displayed absolute fealty.
The truly staggering part is that Republicans knew this could happen. Yet Cornyn and others in the party were convinced Trump 2.0 had evolved into a more disciplined leader instead of the same agent of chaos who helped torch the party’s 2022 Senate races by going all in with turd candidates like Herschel Walker.
Now Republicans assclowns get to watch a seat that could have been comfortably safe become either the Democrats’ first statewide win in Texas since 1994 or at the very minimum a financial sinkhole. Millions that could have gone toward defending vulnerable Senate races elsewhere now appear to be destined for the Lone Star State because Trump couldn’t resist another narcissistic tantrum.
But that’s the way it goes inside the abusive MAGA household: just smear on more makeup to hide the latest split lip.
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